Autonomous driving: A big
public debut for a self-driving bus in Las Vegas turned out to be trouble. An autonomous shuttle bus collided with a
semi-truck just a few hours after Las Vegas city officials held a ceremony to
celebrate its first day as part of a larger
city-wide test. (Read here).
Waymo makes history testing on public roads with no one at the wheel. (Read here).
Tencent is reportedly testing its own
autonomous driving system. (Read here).

Safety: Ford made a trucker hat that uses technology to save
truckers’ lives. The new SafeCap tracks head movement to determine whether
drivers are safely awake or about to snooze. (Read here).

Geographical expansion: Opel will enter more than 20 new
markets by 2022, with Argentina, Saudi Arabia,
and Taiwan among countries identified as potential export markets. Opel also is
exploring whether to sell cars in China and Brazil. With Opel's entire lineup
moving to PSA platforms, Opel has much more freedom to pursue sales in
non-European markets. (Read here).

Connected cars: Ola
partners with Microsoft to build a connected
vehicle platform for car manufacturers. (Read here).
Denso announces it has developed a thin-film transistor enabling it to produce
what it says is the world’s largest
automotive head-up display, a human-machine interface with a nearly 24-in.
(61-cm) projection. (Read here).

Technology Investments: Boeing’s investment arm, Boeing Horizon X
Ventures, has made its first investment in materials research, in the form of
Gamma Alloys. (Read here).

Avionics: Honeywell’s suite
of advanced cockpit technologies and industry-leading auxiliary power units has
been selected by China’s Spring Airlines for its future fleet of Airbus
A320neo aircraft. (Read here).

UI Issues: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI
confusion. (Read here).
UI often doesn’t get same importance in aerospace and defense as in automotive
and other consumer-oriented sectors. This
incident should highlight the importance of
UI in aerospace and defense sector also.

Flying Taxis: Uber has partnered with NASA to help it
develop air traffic management systems for its flying taxi initiatives. (Read here).

Space: Thales Alenia Space has signed a contract with the UK
Space Agency to work on MicroCarb, a joint UK-French satellite mission which
will measure sources and sinks of carbon, the principal greenhouse gas driving
global warming. (Read here).

Software/ High-Tech

Technology updates: Airbnb develops an AI which converts the
design into the source code. (Read here).
IBM says it has created a prototype 50 qubit quantum computer. What does that
mean? It would be a machine close to the threshold at which it could perform
tasks beyond the reach of conventional supercomputers. (Read here).

Business model: Intelsat and Coca-Cola
are working together to bring satellite-enabled
Wi-Fi services to remote communities
across Africa. (Read here).

Graphics chips: Intel to develop its own graphics chips led
by former AMD exec. (Read here). Intel
and AMD team up against Nvidia to produce a new laptop chip. (Read here).

Technology updates: A new patent filing from
telecommunications provider Comcast suggests the firm is looking at how to
store operational data on a blockchain. The blockchain database would hold
private and identifying information for customers, and would only be accessible
by certain entities. (Read here).

Medical Devices

Product innovation: A regular ultrasound machine costs over
$100,000 but a new ultrasound on a chip device attached to a smartphone will be $2000 in 2018. It will be
portable and will eventually make ultrasound as common
as blood pressure cuffs in hospitals, clinics,
and doctors offices and with first responders and field medics. Butterfly iQ is
FDA 510(k) cleared for diagnostic imaging across 13 clinical applications which
span the whole body. (Read here).

Drones in Mining: Drones are now operating underground.
Mining companies look to automation to help companies dig out more ore and save
lives. (Read here).

Drones in O&G: A satellite imaging company, Orbital
Insights, is challenging Saudi Arabia’s reports of declining oil inventory
suggesting that OPEC’s leader may have well been lying to get prices higher.
(Read here).
What is possible by satellite imaging today can be verified by drones tomorrow.

IoT

Testbed: The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), announced
the Digital Solar Plant testbed. The testbed is led by LTI and GE Digital and
will deploy in multiple phases at an L&T Solar plant in Rajasthan, India.
(Read here).

Platforms: Telia Estonia has started trialing a self-service platform for its IoT customers, allowing
them to manage SIM cards and mobile data traffic. (Read here).

PLM / Industry 4.0

Machine Vision and AI for Quality: The Domino’s Pizza group
is implementing an artificial intelligence camera system from Dragontail
Systems which will be deployed to check pizzas for quality before they are handed to customers. (Read here).

Service provider M&A: AXISCADES announced the
acquisition of Mistral, a Bengaluru-based embedded technology company. (Read here).
SEGULA Technologies has announced its acquisition
of EK Design, a German company specializing
in the automotive and industrial / special
vehicle sector. (Read here).